He got $7m for his latest book. So, is Tom Wolfe worth it?

Wolfe's views on modern American fiction have not made him
popular among his peers. After the publication in 1998 of
A Man In Full, Wolfe's sprawling novel of the South,
Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving castigated Wolfe in a
feline literary punch-up. Updike wrote that Wolfe's novels amounted
"to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest
aspirant form". Mailer said reading A Man In Full was like
having sex with an obese woman: "Once she gets on top it's all
over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated." Wolfe likes a fight. He
responded by calling Updike and Mailer "two old piles of bones".
Irving then weighed in on Mailer and Updike's behalf. Reading
Wolfe, he said, could make you "wince". It was
"journalistic hyperbole described as fiction". And to this,
as, perhaps, a final word on the subject, Wolfe replied,
"Irving is a great admirer of Dickens. But what writer does he see
now, in the last year, constantly compared to Dickens? Not
John Irving, but Tom Wolfe... It must gnaw at him terribly."

Wolfe remains unapologetic.

"I have got so much abuse," he tells me. "People said I was just
patting myself on the back by [saying these things]. I would be an
idiot if I believed in this method, and I didn't use it. But, yeah,
in effect I'm saying, 'Hey! I do the right thing! You oughta take a
look!'"

Does he really believe there are no other novelists since 1939
worth reading? Or is he just being provocative?

"Oh there are some good writers," he says. "But they may not do
themselves a favour. Philip Roth is a fabulous writer, but he
pretty much stays within his own life. He's so good - I mean
practically anything I've ever read of his I've really
enjoyed. He just has tremendous talent. But I think he should
have given himself a break and gone deeper into the society. Ralph
Waldo Emerson once said every person has a great autobiography to
write, if only that person can isolate the things that have been
unique to his life... but he didn't say everyone had two."

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So that's it. Philip Roth is OK, but could do better. I mention
Don DeLillo. Wolfe hasn't read him, but promises to give him a try.
"I'm willing to accept some exceptions," he says. "As I keep
saying, I think the American novel is dying. But for that reason, I
seldom read them."

I think of evolution as a myth, like
the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was
created for a rational age

It may not surprise you to know that Wolfe's conservatism spills
into other areas. Back To Blood is, on one level,
reactionary. As Wolfe explains, "It's not about wet blood, it's
about bloodlines." The novel charts representatives of various
racial groups, all of whom are defined by their background, more
than any other factor. No one can escape the fate of being Cuban or
Haitian, black or white. Indeed, the novel's title comes from a
thought-rant by its WASP newspaper editor, a man named Edward
Topping IV, which appears in the book's prologue. Topping has
just been beaten to a parking space unfairly by a
Cuban-American woman, and is quietly fuming.

"Everybody... all of them... it's back to blood! Religion is
dying... but everybody still has to believe in
something... So, my people, that leaves only our
blood, the bloodlines that course through our very bodies, to
unite us. 'La raza!' as the Puerto Ricans cry out.
'The race!' cries the whole world. All people, all
people everywhere, have but one last thing on their minds -
back to blood!"

You get the idea. It's dangerous to extrapolate an author's
beliefs from his characters. But Back To Blood is so
concerned with race - the central character, a Cuban-American
police officer, is, for instance, a "one-man race riot" - that
you begin to wonder how much Wolfe's views collide with those
of his most splenetic actors.

"I didn't think about it politically at all," he says. "I just
think it's simple fact. So many people in this country have a
dual loyalty. They have loyalty to America, but they also are
determined to have their parade up Fifth Avenue once a year...
a Cuban parade or a Puerto Rican parade - many other
countries. So they really don't forget."

"I'll find myself doing the same thing. When the big debate
began over whether abortion should be allowed, there was some
really oldstyle views from White Anglo Saxon Protestants in
Virginia, where I grew up. One of them was Jerry Falwell, and
the other was Pat Buchanan [both firebrand fundamentalist
Christians]. And they were being called, practically, Nazis.
And it got my back up."

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Here, Wolfe begins to laugh. "You know, they were wrong
by saying that the breakdown of morality had brought on all
these different things. But I'm not going to sit down and let
them be attacked the way they were being attacked. They were
being labelled as right-wing extremists. Forget the political
aspects. They were against sin - and they looked upon abortion
as sin. When I grew up, everybody felt that way. And in the
neighbourhood where I grew up, in Richmond, the view of the
church was the view that everybody had."

What to make of this? Supporting Buchanan places you
squarely on the crackpot right of American politics, but I'm
not sure that's what Wolfe has just done. He's arguing he had
a kneejerk reaction to his people - WASPs from Virginia -
being attacked. The extension of this argument is that all
racial or social groups, be they Cuban-Americans, or
Haitian-Americans, or WASPs, protect their own.

It's well-known that Wolfe's personal politics are to the
right of centre. Byron Dobell tells me he briefly fell out
with Wolfe over a story called "The Ambush At Fort Bragg" -
about a scandal at a military base in which soldiers are
accused of a homophobic attack - which was, he says,
"anti-Semitic, subtly, antiblack, subtly, and anti-gay, not so
subtly." Although he has now reconciled with Wolfe, Dobell
says his friend is a "Puritan in Cavalier clothing".

Wolfe won't tell me who he voted for at the last
election ("There's a reason there's a curtain at the back
of the booth") or what he thinks of Barack Obama ("I really haven't been
paying attention"), except that the current president has been
impotent to change America, in the same way that many
presidents before him have been.

"American government is like a train on a track. You have
the people on the left shouting; you have the people on the
right. But the train's on track. They just keep ploughing
ahead. So you find things like: Ronald Reagan comes in, he's
going to get rid of the Department of Education. Eight years
later it's bigger than it's ever been. Then Bill Clinton and
his wife are going to overhaul the healthcare system.
That lasted about three weeks. You couldn't go that far from
the train..."

Scratch Wolfe a little, however, and you find him
particularly irked by political correctness and by the liberal
orthodoxies he sees sweeping the country. He talks about the
recent incident in which the president of the Chick-fil-A
fast-food chain said he didn't believe in single-sex marriage.
"Oh my God, the reaction with the columnists here - they
thought he was a neo-Nazi. The religious aspects of it were
never addressed, it was: you just can't say this."

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With that catalyst, he gets on a roll. He begins a colloquy
about the Sermon on the Mount, and the Emperor Constantine,
and how "radical chic" has become mainstream. His example? The
prevailing, quasi-religious adherence to Darwinism in
America.

"College faculties, today! You do not dare indicate that you
don't believe in Darwinism. You just become a persona non
grata. They're not going to trash your house or anything,
but it's a real sin. And that's very much a fashion. I think
of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths
- anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age."

He tells me he's writing a book on this subject, entitled
The Human Beast - due next year. But wait. Wolfe
doesn't believe in evolution? "I think that it works perfectly
well until you get to Man," he says.

How to explain the evolution of Thomas Kennerly
Wolfe Junior? His life looks appealing from almost any angle
one cares to view it from. In person, he is affable,
inquisitive, and in possession of perfect manners. He sells
novels like Coca-Cola sells fizzy pop. He is in remarkable
shape for a man of 81, and has, he tells me, nine books
planned for the coming years. He is married to a smart,
engaging woman, lives in a gorgeous apartment, and has
two grown-up children. The weekend I fly home from
New York, he'll be in the Hamptons, in the sunshine.

But something's missing. As the years go by, he is waxing
cranky. His finest quality as a writer has been to inhabit the
worlds of his subjects. But what worlds would he now want to
live in, other than his own? It seems that where once he was
pleasantly baffled by the oddities of the American social
carnival, he now disapproves of the whole damn show.

What irks him, perhaps, is that for all his private
happiness and public success - for all the ultramarine pianos
and park views and silver picture frames - a grand prize
eludes him: literary greatness.

I ask him, shortly before I leave, whether he yearns for
the professional esteem of his peers. He tells me that the
verdict on him, so far, is only that he is
"popular".

Does he need more than that? Does he need for someone to
call him great?

"Well, they haven't gotten around to that yet," he says,
smiling. "But, I'd be very grateful. When they do, you let me
know."